Ronald Reagan

The theme on my blog page is: Change The World Through Leadership Now. I chose that to represent the impact I want to have through my passion for Leadership. Every article, Instagram picture, Tweet, LinkedIn post, or FaceBook post is designed to reach as many connections as possible. My desire is to Change The World, one person at a time, through the sharing of leadership insights.

In his bestselling book, The Go Giver, Bob Burg stated, “Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interest first.” The impact of your helping one person is far reaching. The residual effects of helping one person can truly change the world.

Help them help themselves. As a leader, your help should not be in the form of micromanaging. Sure, you will set the vision and work to align the goals, but your employees need to experiment, build experience and learn to excel using their strengths to accomplish the goals and achieve the vision. Doing it for them is short lived and offers no value beyond the immediate.

“A leader’s job is not to do the work for others, it’s to help others figure out how to do it themselves…and succeed beyond what they thought possible.”– Simon Sinek

Help them help you. There are two personal benefits to helping others. First, it’s rewarding to be part of someone’s success – it feels good to help. There’s a Chinese Proverb that says, “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.” Second, the people you help will want to help you in return; they want that happiness for themselves.

Help them help others. Changing the world is a big endeavor. And if we are being realistic it’s hard to think of a way to do that. Steve Jobs got really close with Apple and his personal goal of, “Making a dent in the universe.” One way we can all think changing the world is by helping one person at a time who will also help one more person at a time – eventually it will reach the world.

“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”– Ronald Reagan

Share this:

In school classes each teacher has a seating chart. These are first set up alphabetically to help the teacher learn each student’s name. As the year progresses, students may move to seats that better suit their particular needs. Some students do their best in the front of the room as they see the board better, others move closer to their friends because they learn best in social settings. No matter the system used to place students on the seating chart, it is all done to help them achieve the best possible outcome.

Successfully leading a team also requires a seating chart. Like the school classroom example, this seating chart needs to adapt over time to help your team achieve success. In his book Good to Great Jim Collins talks about great companies as a bus. The bus drivers are the leaders and their main job is to get the right people in the right seats on the bus so they can arrive at the right destination.

Here are three ways leaders can use the seating chart to help their team achieve the best possible outcomes:

Help your team align to their talents

The best performing teams recognize the diverse talents of each individual, make sure they are in the right seats, and fit them together to achieve a common purpose. According to Gallup, “The best opportunity for people to grow and develop is to identify the ways in which they most naturally think, feel, and behave, and then build on those talents to create strengths.”

People want to be personally successful and on a successful team. Unless we all operate in our strength zone, we will be less successful than we could be. Aligning people with their talents is a sure way to give them the best shot at being all the can be.

Help your team aspire to be great

Being in the right seat and excelling in the right seat are two different things. People may be naturally gifted with talent, but it takes work to become great. Reaching greatness requires diligently practicing to hone your strengths. Inspirational author H. Jackson Brown, Jr. says it this way, “Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.”

There are many self-motivated people who may challenge themselves each day, but sometimes it is easier for others to see what we can become. The leader’s role here is to challenge your team to succeed today beyond yesterday and tomorrow beyond today. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it like this, “Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”

Help your team help others

Achieving personal greatness by being in the right seat and becoming your personal best is a great accomplishment worth celebrating and emulating. The ultimate in success is never just our own personal achievements. The real accomplishment is always in helping others learn from our actions and succeed even beyond our results.

For those driven to success, the steps from personal to team success and from team success to other’s success are mere extensions of the same desire to be the best. Those who want to be the best will be searching for the next step. Zig Ziglar highlights this search when he says, “There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing that your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.”

Your role as the leader is to now change the seating chart once again so that the best individuals can become the best leaders. As Ronald Reagan said, “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets people to do the greatest things.”

Share this:

Being a successful team doesn’t mean you always agree, at first. It means you develop a method to come to agreement. Here are the five steps you should take to resolve conflict:

Make the first move. Reach out, make a phone call, and schedule the meeting. Get the discussion going. Don’t wait to be invited to the party, host the party.

Reaffirm your dedication to the desired end state. Make sure there is understanding and alignment on the positive outcome that you both desire – we are in this together trying to get to the same place.

Begin with what might be your fault. Ask yourself, then the other party, two important questions to start the discussion on a positive track: What should I have done? What could I do now? You can’t get around the obstacles until you agree on what the obstacles are.

Listen for their perspective. Conflict always involves emotion. The most powerful action in conflict is for people to know they have been heard and understood. Only then is resolution possible.

Agree on the path forward. The goal is not to prove you are right, it is to provide the light…to the right answer. Ask questions about possible options, offer potential solutions, all with a keen focus on the desired end state.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” – Ronald Reagan

Share this:

Sometimes leaders need to look inside and reflect on themselves. Your actions may be visible and impactful to everyone around you, but are they still connected to the core of your leadership strength – the desire to help others succeed? What happens when your leadership focus slowly switches from each individual succeeding, to your personal success in making that happen? Albert Einstein once said, “It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.”

Here are three key areas that leaders should focus on as they lead from the inside out:

Share this:

Official Portrait of President Ronald Reagan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out.” – Ronald Reagan

Delegation of authority is serious business. It requires that you trust others with the authority to implement your vision. For a leadership team to be successful you have to be able to delegate.

Yes, your leadership team has to be all focusing on the same goal, but there are multiple paths to each mountain. Some leaders surround themselves with other leaders who could be mistaken for their mirror images and don’t get the benefit of different perspectives. When this happens, every new challenge has only one solution: the ones we already know.

While each individual is limited by their own knowledge and experience in their ability to offer solutions to problems; each person has a diverse set of strengths formed by their abilities, knowledge, and experience.

When people with diverse strengths are brought together, the ability to offer multiple solutions to problems becomes possible.

An ancient Japanese proverb sums this up well: “All of us are smarter than one of us.”